The whole Marti youtube channel is a marvel for engineering geeks like me. If you have the occasion, you should take a look (talks about tunneling, big machines, etc)
They use a tunnel boring machine to bore a tunnel with a 45° slope.
They do go into the mechanics of how they make this insanely massive machine drive up a grade that steep, and how they ensure it doesn't slide backward.
I was glued to the screen more than with most movies.
If you like channels like Practical Engineering, you will enjoy this.
The boring company isn't move fast and break things. They literally just bought a drill and use it like any other construction company. There's no innovation at all.
They started that way, just buying a drill, but are now trying to innovate and build their own one. They are just starting using Prufrock-3. The Prufrocks are machines the Boring company have made themselves. They say "Prufrock's medium-term goal is to exceed 1/10 of human walking speed, which is 7 miles per day." which is way faster than anyone else. The Swiss machine in the video did 400m in 4 months. They are also experimenting with evacuated tunnels (https://youtu.be/nV07jqwCy0A?t=879) which may not go anywhere but is at least an attempt at innovation.
"7 miles per day" is all talk and no proof it can actually be done. The Swiss dig a lot of holes from easy to very complex terrain. If there was an easy way go that much faster they would.
There was a derailment of a cargo train the the Gotthard base tunnel last year [1]. It caused a huge amount of damage and one tunnel will be close until September this year. They need to replace 7km of track. If there way anyone to do this correctly faster they would as it is costing millions not having this route open. Concrete needs time to cure etc. some things you can't just make faster because someone said so.
It’s incredible how defensive people get around others’ ambitious goals.
Every Elon company sets super high goal targets. They are often completely unrealistic with current technology but it inspires certain types of people to innovate and it works quite well.
> The Swiss dig a lot of holes from easy to very complex terrain. If there was an easy way go that much faster they would.
Nobody said anything about “easy”. Also, The argument of “the established players don’t work on X so X isn’t possible” doesn’t work.
If the Swiss are happy with their industry the industry isn’t going to risk really capital intense experimentation to do better. See: Innovator’s dilemma
> The Swiss machine in the
> video did 400m in 4 months.
No, a lot of the time the machine was stationary because the needed to manually reinforce what they were about to drill through, so the machine wouldn't get trapped and buried in gravel. Wouldn't Prufrock-3 be similarly slowed down!
In addition to that I assume that the 7 miles a day claim assumes 24/7 drilling, whereas I wouldn't be surprised if the swiss were doing 8/5 drilling.
Nobody said “break things”. Making one specific thing reliably, quickly and cheap is a completely different approach to the “move fast and break things” approach.
Fast. Fast always wins. Trying something, regardless of outcome teaches something about the world. The more trials, the more you roll the dice, the more you learn.
I really hate being wrong, but it is much better to be wrong a lot, and quickly understand why. The alternative is to try nothing. It’s kinda sad.
Fast wins for something like mobile apps but not infrastructure where safety matters and you can’t just shrug off liability. The Boring Company is a great example: fast to market themselves but almost all of their projects have fallen through.
Which nascent technologies have became common, dominant by innovators unilaterally adhering to the precautionary principle?
The cliché "Worse is better" describes this (turrible) phenomenon. (The flip side being "safety regulations are written in blood.")
I really wish this wasn't the world we live in. I want to live in a world with consequences (and justice). I've been railing against it my whole career. And judging from my meager savings, failing in my efforts.
Iteration always wins. There may be other constraining factors, but if you can violate those to iterate more (i.e. cheat), you’ll beat your competitors who honor those constraints.
This has nothing to do with the success or failure of any given company.
You seem to have misunderstood what I’m saying. Iteration is how you learn. Learning through iteration, which is known under various names like Wright’s law or more generally experience curve effects [1], goes hand in hand with economies of scale in driving down costs.
Yes, iteration requires you to survive. Not sure how that’s relevant. Cutting corners also isn’t necessarily a bad thing - you’re focusing on the extreme example where people die. Cutting corners can also be a careful evaluation of what processes are and aren’t relevant to a given situation but that becomes trickier when it’s enshrined in law. Imagine if guidelines from the 80s about how to write software were enshrined in law.
Regulations more often than not do ignore the flip side in terms of the cost of compliance because it’s difficult to show the counter factual universe in which a regulation may save 10% more lives (or maybe even 0% more lives) but drove up costs by 100x.
> A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".
It does depend on the domain though. Sometimes moving slowly and carefully can result in a faster successful outcome than throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.
> The more trials, the more you roll the dice, the more you learn.
If you have infinite dice rolls this is obviously true. If every dice roll costs you something or indeed everything... heh. Maybe don't just roll it to see what happens?
Yes, sure fast wins when building a bridge. Or a tunnel. Which then collapses. Safe wins, this is not Facebook where people share some holiday pictures.
"but it is much better to be wrong a lot"
I disagree, "Oh the bridge collapesed, I was wrong! But this is much better than being right" - Nope.
... which has its own reasons, namely regulations (you know, every time there was a new disaster they added another one) or maybe some corruption. You don't see bridges falling in US regularly killing tons of folks, do you.
I am not saying its ideal and there is no room for improvement, nothing in real world is, but please consider other, 'fast' scenarios for long term (100+ years) existence when not only many lives are at stake.
> You don't see bridges falling in US regularly killing tons of folks, do you.
Falling yes. Killing is hit-or miss. I would be surprised if the reasons bridges are failing due to lack of maintenance is entirely unrelated to the cost of building.
There are many ways things could be better, and many ways things could be worse.
Attacking something only because it's cheaper and faster seems silly.
Please share a single recent example from US, I am only aware of one relatively recent catastrophic case from northern Italy, where maintenance was subpar.
Cheaper reflects many things, overall quality testing, attention to detail, how much effort went into design etc. Its not a silver bullet but oh boy does it always show on result, without exception.
I was more impressed by the OP seemingly from Swiss public body. The Marti one in GP is exactly the sort of sales demo type video I'd expect 'for a contracting company', though with lashings of high speed chase or shooting narrated video (you know, the 40% ads, 50% rehashing what we've seen or telling us what's to come, 10% content variety) for some reason.
Because there are American (or Canadian, British, etc) companies that do what's necessary for American Civil Engineering.
When it is worth it, American public works entities do reach out to German (and other national) companies. As to issues like this specifically? Because the US generally has wider freeways/highways, so is less impacted by single/double lane shutdowns for surfacing. In addition, many states have opted for less long-lasting quick pack asphalt for surface streets which can be resurfaced in place and ready to drive on again in a few hours.
I know it's Internet rhetoric to assume America and it's government are incompetent, but the Civil Corps of Engineers, CalTrans, etc are actually pretty good at their jobs. The biggest horror stories are jobs given to private entities that go overbudget and overtime.
One factor you’ll see in many areas of government is the second order cost of eliminating civil service positions. It’s most common to talk about how contractors usually end up costing more and being less efficient due to additional overhead and conflicts of interest, but there’s a deeper problem that the government doesn’t have a staff of people with the knowledge and experience to select and manage contractors. That’s how you end up in situations where none of the alternatives are better than eating the cost of a bad plan or accepting a lower project lifetime, and because it’s a managerial failure the blame is often spread between three or more organizations and often has no effective accountability.
Well, for the California example, CalTrans is the govt. They're well staffed and don't (generally, it may occur occasionally) rely on contractors for their work. I believe the same goes for CDOT and other agencies, though many of them are more willing to contract out as they don't necessarily prioritize roadwork like Californians do (for obvious reasons).
Generally, it's particularly rare (at least in the Western "blue" States) to rely on mostly or, especially, exclusively private public works programs.
